


The Saga of Angron

by moreagaara, The_LupercalXVI



Series: The Emperor Revived [15]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Ascension, Blood, Blood Magic, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Daemons, Daggers, Deviates From Canon, Dreams, Gen, Genderswap, Healing, Magic, Magic Revealed, Meditation, Memories, Mortality, Mutation, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Post-Ascension, Recovered Memories, Repressed Memories, Siblings, Sleep, Sleep Deprivation, Soul Bond, Soulmates, Training, Understanding, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24078454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara, https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_LupercalXVI/pseuds/The_LupercalXVI
Summary: In which Angron, after being rescued from Khorne by the Emperor, wakes up and discovers that he can switch biological sexes, and that his female form (since he has never used it before now) is still very humanoid.  I should also point out that this (and a couple other shorts written about Angron) were written before the Angron Primarchs book came out and clarified that the Nails were only given to a select few gladiators, and not...all of them.  As I had assumed.  Oh well.Peep ownership!Games Workshop:  WH40k and relatedMe:  the writing
Series: The Emperor Revived [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1447444
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	1. Awakening

**Author's Note:**

> In which Angron, after being rescued from Khorne by the Emperor, wakes up and discovers that he can switch biological sexes, and that his female form (since he has never used it before now) is still very humanoid. I should also point out that this (and a couple other shorts written about Angron) were written before the Angron Primarchs book came out and clarified that the Nails were only given to a select few gladiators, and not...all of them. As I had assumed. Oh well.
> 
> Peep ownership!  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> Me: the writing

Angron hadn’t slept since the day he had received the Butcher’s Nails a few weeks after he had arrived on the hellworld named Nucreia. It was a rare side effect, his masters had said, but a welcome one: a gladiator who could not sleep was one who devolved into anger, rage, and berserk fury that much faster. It didn’t take Angron long to figure out why; within the first few days of sleeplessness, every shadow held a threat. Every distant noise was a maddened gladiator, escaped from their cell and out for blood—anyone’s would do.

Somehow, Angron had found a state of restfulness despite the Nails; not the prohibited sleep, but a trancelike state that lent him increased awareness of his surroundings. It helped him keep track of the real world, and decreased the hallucinations. After a while, he made a game of identifying the noises he heard around him, and that helped even more. After his escape, he had shared his methods with the other Sleepless; they had been deeply grateful to him up to the moment of their deaths.

He tensed, even in the sleep he relished, the sleep that had been denied him for thousands of years. He had insisted the man who named himself Emperor—just another slave master in truth, for all his talk of enlightenment and altruism—remove the armies threatening him and his friends before so much as considering his offer of becoming a conqueror to make all other conquerors and slave masters tremble. The Emperor had complied, he supposed; he had unleashed the worst kind of death upon the armies gathered around the mountains. A dishonorable death, against a foe that could not be fought. Poisoned air, some sort of gas that turned the air sickly yellow; his friends had heard the men that composed the armies choking and dying, and had gone down to dispense mercy, only to join the armies in their death.

The Emperor could not be forgiven for that, and neither could Angron. He shouldn’t have insisted, he should have tried to stop his friends from going down…he hadn’t had a choice in what to do with himself without them. He became the Primarch the Emperor wanted, and he conquered world after world in his name. For a long while, he wondered if the Emperor knew he sought death by combat; when the headaches began, he almost welcomed them. When they worsened, he hated them. When they grew powerful enough that he couldn’t leave his quarters for days at a time, he understood they heralded his death.

Then Lorgar had given him a new form, a form that could not die and could not be stopped, and bloodlust that could never be sated. But he had left the Nails alone, and they still worked even without a true brain to work on. He’d been happy, deliriously happy, so long as he kept killing and spilling blood…even come to thank Lorgar for stealing him from the death he’d wanted for so long. He relaxed in his sleep, remembering those times. So many enemies had fallen before him. Humans, eldar, tau, orks, daemons, tyrannids…none could stand before him, and he had bathed in their blood and made presents of their skulls to the blood god. 

The Nails were gone now. He would never again feel that level of happiness. The man whom the Emperor named his father— _their_ father, the Emperor was and had always been his brother somehow—had taken them. Saved him, stopped him from hurting everyone around him…stopped him from hurting mama. He didn’t know why he remembered her, but not his father; after a while, he decided it didn’t matter. He could sleep now, could dream, and in his dreams, he could see his mama.

Better to stay asleep. He could have everything he ever wanted in his dreams. He could see his friends again, and he could talk to them; it was as though they had never died. He could see his enemies driven before him, and punish them without being forced to kill them; of course he still killed them, eventually, but not because some machine in his brain made him or some god insisted. He could have the delirious happiness he’d enjoyed as a daemon prince, and he could have it just from thinking about little things, things that had never made him feel a thing in life. Best of all, he could see his mama and talk to her. She would hold him, comfort him, just like he remembered she had done when he was young.

And besides, if he stayed asleep, he wouldn’t need to kill ever again. He wouldn’t need to be angry—could feel things other than anger. He could be happy at his own thoughts. Yet…he started to see things he didn’t want to see. He saw his mama wrapped in chains, and forced to feed souls to someone she wouldn’t let him see. The one time he managed to see through her hiding, he saw terror incarnate, and didn’t look again. He wanted to help her, more than he’d ever wanted anything else. But if he was going to help her, he had to wake up, and he had forgotten how.

It was a struggle to find his way back to himself, and another struggle to fit his spirit inside the hulk of a body that no longer felt like his. He shouldn’t look as bestial as he did, shouldn’t be so horrifyingly tall and broad…there had to be a way to fix it, Angron was certain of that much, but nothing came to mind as he scoured new/old memories. There were memories of lessons with his father—his face still unclear in Angron’s memory—of lessons on healing himself even from a state where his spirit and body were separated… _hmm_.

His body wasn’t technically injured, but it wasn’t the shape he wanted, and his spirit definitely was separated from it. Perhaps, if he just thought of the changes he wanted to make as healing, and if he _wanted_ it badly enough…but nothing would come. He could feel the magic nearby, but it wouldn’t answer him no matter how hard he reached for it. He felt anger boiling within him, and saw the magics stirring, and tried to use his anger as a harness, but still nothing came. So he stoked his anger higher, and turned its full force against the magic that should come, had to come…

And still did not.

But something else did. Something took over his body, smoothed it into a humanoid shape, and tucked the monster Lorgar had turned him into away. Now Angron could slip into his body as easily as breathing, and could wake up if he wanted. He waited, though, taking stock of what he could remember from both his lives. His brother, Lion, had once relayed a lesson to him: their bodies could change sexes if the spirit within desired it enough, and Lion had tried it once. Mostly, Lion had said, it had felt uncomfortable.

The longer Angron thought about it, the more comfortable he felt, even if his body did have more curves than he was used to. He still had plenty of hard muscle, and suspected he would be just as strong as he remembered he’d been when he did finally wake up. There was something that bothered him, still…something that lingered in the back of his mind. When he turned to face it—impatient with the very idea of cowardice—he found his old, monstrous shape. His male self. If he needed it, he could take it up again.

Right now, he did not need it. Right now, he needed to wake up.

So Angron opened his eyes.


	2. Revitalized

Angron noticed that nearly everyone reacted differently to him in his new body, including Roboute Guilliman. The only people who seemed to know and understand what had happened were Alpharius—who had apparently learned how to teleport at some point during the past ten thousand years—the Emperor, and his newly discovered father, Crawyen. Angron had spoken with him a little, and had learned that changing sexes was utterly normal for their mother’s species, and therefore for him and all his brothers.

Crawyen was not, however, sure why Angron wasn’t able to use his magical gifts, however. The only thing Angron was able to access was his blood-magic empowered healing, and even that was dulled significantly; what took Crawyen a few moments to heal for himself took Angron several minutes to an hour. Angron decided to worry about it all later, when he had the time to devote to the subject. At the moment, he had other things to worry about.

For instance, there was the issue of Khorne, the Chaos God who had decided to place him in the worst possible sort of torment for the terrible crime of wanting to remember when the Emperor told him there was more to his life. He did remember nearly everything now: he’d always liked fighting and shows of strength, but when mercenary jobs had started to dry up after he’d become so recognizable, he’d wandered north to Greece, where he had completed a variety of impossible tasks under the name of Heracles. Then, after he’d had to fake his own death twice, he’d wandered west to the new city of Rome to help them out.

There he’d been happy. In the interests of not making his face thoroughly recognizable to countries outside of Rome (since he might need to flee to them later when the Roman people started asking too many questions), he had avoided military service. But since he had still wanted to fight, he had constantly signed himself up for the gladiator games. No sooner would his contract expire and he would get his money than he would sign himself up for another contract and he would hold a lottery for his winnings among the needy citizens of Rome.

He had enjoyed the attention, especially after he had learned that if he mentioned something ought to be done where the Roman people could hear him, they would tend to agree with him and pressure the Senate for it. Even if he was technically a slave, and technically not a citizen, and technically had no voice of his own. He hadn’t expected the Senate would perceive him as a threat, and certainly hadn’t expected them to try and kill him. He also hadn’t expected they would ask the gods for help in killing him, or that their version of the god of war—a god they had borrowed from Greece—would show up to personally kill him.

Angron sighed, and silently practiced his aim. He’d gotten much better at hitting his target over the past hour, and had started growling under his breath that the Nails—and then Khorne—had stopped him from enjoying this particular activity. The Nails hadn’t just made him get in close to his opponents; they’d made him _want_ to get in close and overpower them, to feel their flesh splitting under his own raw strength, and it had taken so much effort to hold back when they had fought well…and Khorne had made even that small mercy impossible. He snarled and threw his next dagger with a little too much force; the throw went wild, ricocheting off the wall and eventually landing exactly where Angron’s left foot had been.

He sighed and took a deep breath to calm himself down, then picked the dagger back up and went to retrieve the others; those he had managed to perfectly cluster in the area where a space marine’s hearts would be. He didn’t react outwardly when the door to the training area he’d borrowed opened; likely it was a Custodian, who would likely offer to spar or train with him.

He didn’t expect to see Lorgar—of all people—when he turned around, and didn’t expect Lorgar to feel as much like Khorne as he did. Angron frowned, regarding Lorgar through narrowed eyes; despite no longer being as thoroughly Chaotic as he had been, Angron was still sworn to Khorne. He instinctively knew that Lorgar had Khorne’s essence, which meant that Lorgar could command Angron even without meaning to. As Angron looked closer, he realized that Lorgar wasn’t actually a Primarch any longer; he was only slightly taller than the average human, and was moving with a dedicated precision that indicated he was used to a very different body. The reason he didn’t look odd to Angron was that he looked exactly as he had before Angron had left Sumeria to be a mercenary.

Lorgar noticed his staring. “The fuck do you want, battle-sister?” he snarled. Angron blinked, his brow furrowed. He had thought that Lorgar would at least recognize him, even if he didn’t understand what had happened. Then again, it had taken Guilliman several meetings before he had realized who Angron was…

So Angron shrugged. “Wondering what you wanted,” he said; Alpharius had commented that his voice was decidedly low-pitched for a woman, and Angron had been working to lower it further without actually taking on his male shape. “And if you were planning to get in the way of my practicing,” he continued, idly flipping one of his throwing daggers and catching it by the hilt. He couldn’t help but think of all the various ways he could kill or injure Lorgar, and how little time Lorgar would have to react in his original shape.

“I _wanted_ to work out in peace,” Lorgar snapped. Angron tilted his head; not only was that the sort of activity Lorgar had never wanted to do either when they were both young or after they had been reborn, but that was exactly how Khorne would state his intentions to his daemon princes. _Khorne’s starting to be stronger than he is…and I don’t think he knows,_ Angron thought to himself. But once again, he only shrugged and moved his target to where he could both throw daggers and keep an eye on his brother.

Silence reigned in the training room; Lorgar severely stuck to his half of the room, while Angron occasionally stepped over the invisible line to retrieve objects from the storage closet in Lorgar’s half. Every single time, Lorgar’s eyes would flash red, and he would growl at Angron, who would ignore him but for a sidelong glance. While Angron was throwing daggers—now only half paying attention to what he was doing—he noticed that Lorgar had started to glow when Angron looked at him through his peripheral vision, and that the glow vanished whenever Angron looked at him directly.

Green was the most common color, and closest to his body, but there were other colors. Blue and purple mixed in most thoroughly, and yellow wasn’t terribly uncommon, but there was also red. A lot of red, and almost as much of it as there was of the green. The red flickered like fire and flowed like blood; the green pulsed steadily like a heartbeat. Every so often, however, the pulsing would miss a single beat, and it would be taken up by the red instead.

Every time that happened, Lorgar would mess up one of his sets. He would misplace a foot, or get his grip wrong, he would snarl and the red would grow stronger; after four such incidents, Lorgar started quivering. Angron stopped throwing his daggers to pay closer attention to his brother; he calmly started cutting his fingernails as cover for his watching. He silently counted down the seconds until the next red pulse; this time, Lorgar snapped and threw the weights down in frustration. Now he noticed his shaking, so he wove his fingers together, looking for something to do.

Deliberately, Angron let his dagger slip and slice open the tip of his finger. Blood welled up after a short delay, but he had Lorgar’s attention immediately. Angron sighed and sucked the surface blood away; the wound would be fully healed as though he had never cut his finger in just a few minutes. However, Lorgar’s reaction to the tiny injury was telling; no normal human—as Lorgar now was—would have been able to detect that little blood in this large of a room. Khorne—and Angron, after he had officially become a daemon prince—had been able to do that, however, and that meant that Khorne was starting to win out over Lorgar.

Lorgar was still shaking as he made his way over to Angron, attempting to be casual; Angron merely flipped the knife he’d been using into the air and caught it by the hilt. “You ever think you might have messed up the whole thing with your brother Angron?” he asked, also attempting to be casual. Lorgar stopped less than ten feet away.

“What do you mean?” he asked; there was a faint echo to his words that Angron recognized all too well.

He turned to face Lorgar and took three steps forward; now he was close enough to put his injured hand on Lorgar’s shoulder. Lorgar sniffed the air and didn’t notice that he had. “I mean maybe Angron wanted to die,” Angron answered. “Whether it was death by the Nails or death in battle didn’t really matter. And if that was the case…” he paused a little, then gave a sideways nod, half shrugging once again. “Maybe he hated you for making him a daemon prince. At least at first. And he doesn’t really seem like the forgiving type to me.”

Red swamped the last few shimmers of gold in Lorgar’s eyes. “You don’t know anything,” he muttered. “You weren’t there. You weren’t fucking there, you don’t know ANYTHING ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED!” he yelled, out of control, and only realized how badly he’d snapped after he’d thrown a punch at Angron and broken his hand as a result. Angron hadn’t even moved to block him.

Angron looked at him sadly, and made his decision. “Actually, I do know what happened, Lorgar. Because I was there. And I was the one you did it to,” he said. _How to do this…_ Angron thought swiftly. He needed to pull Khorne’s essence out of Lorgar, and to do that, he needed to make his own connection to Khorne stronger than Lorgar’s. The fastest way to do that…he closed his eyes and felt his body shift. At first it was subtle: he felt himself growing taller, gaining still more muscle mass, and then the pain began.

He shifted his weight so that he was balanced on the balls of his feet, which turned into two-toed hooves. His back bowed on itself, curved first by his spine losing its normal shape, and then pressed lower by the growth of two massive wings—he couldn’t use them to fly, but they served well to intimidate his enemies and as extra limbs to bloody his foes. His skin split, showing bare, red muscles; his teeth turned into fangs. Angron snarled suppressed fury as his skull liquified; the Nails were gone, and so could not be a part of his male shape, but his father and the Emperor had not been able to completely heal the bone where they had once bitten. They had only been able to close the holes over with skin, and as his skin was now gone, he felt air slip through the holes to reach his fully-healed brain.

It hurt. It hurt to move, it hurt to breathe, it hurt to think, it hurt to exist. Khorne’s power amplified that pain, and demanded he unleash it on the nearest living creature: Lorgar. Angron was furious at the Chaos god for still attempting to control him, to use him like a slave, and held back despite _everything_ , just as he had on Nucreia. Of course, Khorne could still make Lorgar speak and control him that way; his power mixed with Lorgar’s would overcome Angron’s resistance.

So Angron picked his brother up—he was so fragile now, his jaw snapped at Angron’s lightest touch—and held him in the air so he could look into his brother’s eyes. One was gold, like the Emperor’s, but paler, and it was filled with fear. The other was a crimson so deep it was almost black, and held nothing but rage. “That rage doesn’t belong to you, brother,” Angron rumbled; it was getting harder to maintain his shape in the Palace, without a flow of blood and skulls to maintain the demonic energy necessary to fuel his existence.

All the more need to end this quickly; Angron still held one of the throwing daggers in the hand not supporting Lorgar by the chin. He jammed it into Lorgar’s side, and though Lorgar grunted pain, the golden eye widened at the realization that Angron had missed any major organs. Angron dropped him, allowing Lorgar’s weight to fall off the dagger, and jammed the blade into his own side.

Lorgar howled when he withdrew it. Blood—far more blood than either of them owned, and much darker than human blood had any right to be—flowed out of Lorgar’s wound. It became just a little easier to exist; Khorne’s presence generated enough unholy power to keep him alive, even if there was only a third of him here. Angron waited, letting the blood begin to pile onto itself, sculpt itself into a body. When the blood began to form a skull, and the skull had mostly solidified, he swiped it off the pile of blood, which immediately collapsed. Before the skull could collapse itself, Angron opened his mouth as wide as he could and shoved it in; he closed his jaw with a snap, and forced the bare bone down his throat.

Pain. More pain than Angron had ever felt, worse than the pain he had felt when the Emperor held him back as his brothers and sisters choked to death along with the armies that would have killed them, worse than the pain he had felt when Lorgar had originally given him his daemon princely form, worse than the pain of receiving the Butcher’s Nails on Nucreia…worse than the pain when he had started to remember, when Khorne had taken the name of his implants to its literal extreme.

His body tore itself apart once again. Muscles built around his wings, and he even lifted off the floor a few inches when he flapped once, twice, three times. Claws burst through the tips of his fingers, growing in mockery of the metal Talon the Emperor preferred to use in battle. His jaws lengthened into an animal’s snout, and his fangs grew larger, heavier; he grew a second, then a third row of teeth, and the fury, he couldn’t contain the _fury_ —he wanted to break everything around him, to shred it and stomp on its pieces until nothing was left but ashes. Everyone around him needed to die, he needed to paint himself in their blood— _that_ would end his pain, and if he collected their skulls, he would feel so much better; he could start with the Emperor who had dared to remove his Nails—

Angron dove into his memories. The Emperor had helped him remember mama, and how much he had loved her; the Nails would have made him hurt her, so he had demanded the Emperor remove them, and the Emperor had obeyed…him. For a moment, Angron had been the master over the Master of Mankind.

_He could be more than master over the Emperor; he could rise to become the greatest warlord the galaxy had ever seen—_

He already was, and everyone knew it. Everyone, even his World Eaters, feared to speak his name and titles for fear that they would summon him, and his fury. Even Khorne had treated his name with respect. Even Guilliman stepped lightly around him, even now the Nails were gone and he could think clearly for the first time in his rebirth.

_Not all the galaxy feared him; there were those who did not know of his existence. He ought to bring war to them, slaughter them and all they loved, then destroy their planets so that nothing could return—_

But if he did that, he would eventually run out of things to kill. If he destroyed every living soul in the Imperium—in any empire—then no one would be alive to whisper his name with dread, or fear his presence, or look upon his works with dismay. If anything, Angron needed to encourage empires to grow stronger, and turn their researchers’ minds to the finer arts of war, that they could begin to kill as well as he could.

Besides, being the best warrior in the galaxy didn’t mean anything if he didn’t have competition.

The fury flickered, just for an instant. He latched onto that flicker, and the clarity behind it, and remembered himself. He was _Angron_ , Lord of the Red Sands, World Eater, Primarch, God of War, and he was a slave to _no one_. A brief pain fluttered around his forehead as he thought this, and Khorne’s essence became trapped just as he had once trapped Angron within his realm. The Emperor had ridden a river of blood to save him. No one had asked him to, certainly not Angron. No one would have blamed him if he had left Angron the Oathbreaker there. Yet he had risked everything to retrieve him.

The world was starting to come clear to Angron again. He breathed slowly, filling all three of his lungs with air. He lifted his head, and found he could stand tall, unbowed by the weight of his failings and wings—they twitched, and he folded them along his back. There was an unfamiliar weight on his head; he reached up to touch it briefly and winced when he felt tender horn. It was then that he realized that wince was the only pain he felt; Khorne provided enough energy to maintain his shape, and the horns pulled in the rest of the energy he needed to feel like himself. Centered.

He took another deep breath, and looked at Lorgar. “You remember what you told me when I asked why you had done this to me?” Lorgar was too stunned to answer, so Angron continued anyway. “You told me that you’d done it to save me from an existence of unimaginable agony, so that the Nails wouldn’t be able to keep killing me by degrees. You said that you were the only person who cared enough to try, and that only you thought that I should be saved.”

Angron paused; Lorgar still did not speak, or try through his broken jaw. So Angron continued again. “The Emperor’s plan was to let me taste death. He would allow the Nails to kill me, and then he would recreate my body and recall my soul. I would be the only Primarch to be reborn twice. Instead, you denied me the death I wanted. You refused to let me move on the way I should have. Maybe I should kill you for that,” he said. Deep within his mind, Khorne’s power fluttered. _Kill him, kill him, drink his blood and carry his skull with you that all may know what happens to those who anger you—_ Angron brushed him away with a thought.

He shrank himself down, resumed his female form, and offered a hand to Lorgar. “I think I’d rather give you the same treatment you gave me. You’ll live, and we’ll have papa fix you.” At this, Lorgar managed a groan through his shattered jaw. But he did accept Angron’s hand up, and didn’t protest much at Angron tossing him over his shoulders to carry him to Crawyen. It was faster than walking, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Basically what happened was Lorgar, upon discovering that Khorne was (as far as could be determined) a jumped up war and blood spirit that had gotten a lot of power and not a "real" god, went out and killed Khorne and consumed his power. This went about as well as you might expect; he did manage to kill Khorne, but also got lost in Khorne's realm and had to be rescued, and then this happened. He also had to give up a significant amount of being a Primarch in order to actually capture Khorne's essence. You tried, priest boy. The Emperor and Crawyen split Khorne's power up between themselves and Lorgar in order to try and save him (which, clearly, only sort of worked, thus why Angron stepped in here).
> 
> Peep ownership!  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> The_LupercalXVI: Crawyen and Taizy  
> me: the writing and the Emperor's name


	3. Ascension

Time slowed down whenever Angron fought, or at least it seemed like it did. It was a strange feeling; he didn’t remember exactly what it had been like back in Rome, but on Nucreia—after he had gotten the Nails—time had simply ceased to pass, and Angron’s entire existence had become a red-tinged haze of brutality. It had almost been like suddenly falling asleep, almost like some ocean had swamped his being, and eventually he would wake up with hundreds—possibly thousands—of corpses around him, happy at last. It had been a struggle to maintain understanding of the world around him, and even harder to make himself stop to spare the good fighters; but now, even with a third of Khorne’s essence imprisoned within him, he had no trouble whatsoever.

Right now, he simply _moved_. Better to simply not be where the Custodes sparring with him were striking, rather than take an injury and waste potentially hours healing. There were three Custodes still facing him; he had taken one down in the first hour of sparring, and a second after another hour and a half, but the remaining three were too good at reading his tells, and he theirs. Fortunately, none of them found the stalemate boring.

“Angron?” someone called; Angron had a fraction of a second to glance over to see who it was. Alpharius, dressed in casual clothing, and therefore not looking to jump into the match. Angron leaned backwards and felt the edge of a guardian spear cut the air just in front of his throat, then flipped over the Custodian behind him and shoved them forward; they recovered in less than a second and were after him again, where an Astartes—even one of his World Eaters—would have died.

“Yeah?” he answered his brother in the tiny gap before he needed to start dodging again. One of the Custodes was beginning to get tired; Angron pressed him hardest, and after several dozen blows, knocked him out of the fight. _Three hours and forty-five minutes after the last one,_ he thought to himself. The other two Custodes weren’t letting up, however.

“…the Emperor and a few other people are going to talk about what to do about granddad’s sword,” Alpharius commented. Angron was surprised enough that one of the Custodes managed to hamstring him, then fling him to the ground.

He fought on, despite being unable to put his weight on his left leg. “It’s just a sword, right?” he managed to ask; his breath was starting to come in gasps, partly because of the length of the fight and partly because of the pain flickering in his leg. He managed to startle a Custodian by using his bad leg to kick them over. Unfortunately, he overextended himself in the process, and the one remaining Custodian hooked the outstretched leg with his spear and spun him to the ground, pinning him.

Angron could get up. He could keep going, could take down this last Custodian…but instead, he simply tapped the ground three times. The Custodian let him up, and Angron limped over to Alpharius, who had raised a brow in surprise, but didn’t comment on his yielding. “To put it bluntly, the sword eats souls, and we’re discussing why,” Alpharius told him.

“Gotcha,” Angron retrieved a towel and wiped the worst of the sweat off his face. “Be easier to get rid of him if he doesn’t have the sword, and the sword probably shouldn’t exist to boot,” he summarized. The Custodes behind him were cleaning themselves up; those who’d been knocked out earlier were performing what looked like some sort of pattern dance with their spears.

Alpharius nodded. “You wanna listen in?” Angron shrugged, then considered a little more and nodded. Alpharius led him to the room where the Emperor was talking with several other people. The red-bronze woman was in attendance, along with Angron’s father, and a strange man covered with shifting black tattoos on his left side. Guilliman looked over as Angron and Alpharius entered; Alpharius faded into the crowd while Angron and Guilliman eyed each other mistrustfully. Guilliman moved silently, darting forward with pointed fingers aimed at Angron’s hearts; Angron took the blow, but grabbed Guilliman’s outstretched arm and twisted just enough that Guilliman knew Angron could flip him over. Even though Guilliman was wearing power armor and Angron wasn’t—his original power armor had been fused into his Daemon Prince form, and the Emperor hadn’t gotten around to making him a new set yet—and even though Angron was injured and Guilliman wasn’t.

Guilliman narrowed his eyes, but withdrew the hand; Angron let him, and leaned against the wall near the door to listen properly. Most of it he didn’t understand; something about an inside-out soul was mentioned, along with what material the sword had been made of…Angron busied himself with thinking about how one might get the sword away from him.

Guilliman hand-signed to him; they could just steal the sword while their grandfather was sleeping. Angron thought about it, then shook his head. _Khorne had a few daemons try that. Uskary doesn’t sleep,_ he thought, and Guilliman nodded pensively while Angron was considering how to translate that into hand signs.

 _There a way we could call the sword away from him then?_ Guilliman asked, and this time it was Alpharius who answered.

 _Not without sacrificing one of us to it so we’d have a connection to it,_ he said. _Since we don’t know what it’s made of, or who or what the base soul is, anyway._

 _You were thinking of summoning it like a greater daemon or something?_ Angron asked; it certainly sounded like that’s what Alpharius was suggesting.

_Or pulling it with us through a sympathetic bond, yes._

_So basically, we can’t manipulate the sword,_ Guilliman summarized. _Means we have to manipulate him…Khorne know anything about him?_ he directed his last thought more towards Angron.

Angron considered, then dug through Khorne’s memories; the effort made the cut on his leg bleed rather badly, so he pressed his good leg against the wound to stop it. Khorne had spent a good deal of time with Uskary, and for once in his extremely long life had been willing to take orders from someone else. Angron smirked and let out a small laugh through his nose when he realized that Khorne had been seriously considering taking Uskary’s head and thus his power, as Uskary had been seriously considering consuming Khorne’s soul.

 _Uskary and Khorne are…very similar,_ Angron finally answered silently, then blinked when he realized Guilliman had bandaged his bad leg for him. Guilliman was pretending he had done no such thing, so Angron decided not to thank him. _I know how I’d get the sword away from Khorne, so…_ he stepped forward. “So does Uskary like high risk contests?” he asked, as the non-silent conversation had wound down somewhat.

“He does. What do you have in mind?” the tattooed man answered; Angron addressed him directly.

“Simple enough. Challenge him with the sword as the reward if I win, and if I lose, he gets both my soul and Khorne’s. I already have a third of his power, and I can get the rest easily enough,” Angron glanced over at the Emperor and Crawyen; they both nodded. “All I have to do from there is convince him that the soul of a Primarch has value.”

No one was objecting to his plan, so Angron continued. “I figure he’ll take the bet, since even for me, it’ll be damn hard to master the sword, so he’ll be thinking he wins either way.”

“We’re not trying to master the sword. We’re trying to destroy it,” the tattooed man reminded Angron; who shrugged.

“I know that, but he doesn’t,” he answered. “All I actually have to do is master it for a few minutes. Just long enough to get it to you guys, so you can do your thing.” _Whatever that might be…_ Still no one was objecting, though Angron waited for at least the Emperor to tell him it was a terrible plan. Yet he did no such thing, even after Angron directly asked him, once most everyone had left to resume their normal activities.

“I didn’t object because I don’t think it’s a terrible plan. In fact, I think it’s a very good plan. All you need is a decent challenge for someone whose day job is destroying worlds,” the Emperor told him in an undertone as he’d left.

And that had given Angron an idea.

~~*~~

The first step had been healing his leg the rest of the way; while Crawyen was speeding the healing along, Angron ran his idea by him. “Suppose I make the challenge ‘who can destroy a planet faster’?” he’d asked.

“Sounds good to me,” Crawyen had asked, then smacked the meat of Angron’s leg hard. Angron winced, but got up and hobbled around; he managed to smooth his walking out within a few seconds. Then he nodded and started collecting his favorite weapons—all of them pinched with the Emperor’s permission from the Palace armory, since his old weapons had not been retrieved from Khorne’s realm with him. “Of course you’ll need to get his attention.”

Angron shrugged at that, then started collecting the throwing daggers he’d recently grown fond of. “Kicking down the door and demanding an audience worked quite well during the Crusade,” he answered. “…about the rest of Khorne’s soul…” he sucked in a breath when his father rested a hand on his shoulder, and another third of Khorne’s soul flowed into his being.

Pain tore through him again; this time, Angron managed to harness it and take control over the mutations ripping through his bodies. Khorne’s power wanted—desperately wanted—to mutate his female form, and Angron would have none of it; he allowed only a trickle of its full strength into it, and felt himself grow just a few inches while his muscles bulged both from growth and the physical strain of forcing Khorne’s power to manipulate his still-hidden male form. The Talon-like claws that adorned both his hands hardened into bone; within his frame, his skeleton grew far heavier and stronger than it should be, even for a Primarch, almost too heavy for even his Warp-enhanced muscles to move. Angron forced the energies to empower his muscles further still to compensate, but there was still more energy to spend—armor. He could do with some armor.

His female form’s skin thickened slightly, but his male form gained heavy plates of bone modeled after the power armor he had long ago absorbed. Angron’s hearts pounded in tandem; he gasped for breath. There was an aching hollowness in the pit of his stomach; his skull ached as badly as it had when he’d still had the Nails; he bit back a scream—

Everything stopped. Angron had to close his eyes as two sets of reality became clear: the Palace around him, his father’s hand on his shoulder, the _hunger_ in his stomach, the ache from his horns wanting to develop though he wouldn’t let them; and the reality patched together from thousands of different views. His World Eaters, the human souls sworn to Khorne, the daemons strong enough to power themselves who now groveled and called him master…all these he could directly see, and experience the world along with them.

He shivered so that Crawyen let go of him, but still followed him to a place he could eat. Most of what was available was non-perishable foods, easy to transport and difficult to spoil, like ration bars and dried-out strips of meat. It tasted awful, but Angron didn’t complain; anything would do so long as it sated his hunger. It took him an hour before he slowed down; by then, he had managed to figure out how to give orders to those who followed him, and informed the daemons that they were now his rather than Khorne’s. They continued to grovel, and Angron could feel the desire to challenge him blistering in their minds, but they obeyed him. Only through him could they hear the voice of their creator.

By the time his belly was full, Angron had determined he would not delay retrieving the final piece of Khorne’s soul from the Emperor. Daenus, he supposed; his brother, apparently. Not that he had ever acted like one… “That _is_ a terrible idea,” Crawyen informed him, arms folded; he stood in Angron’s path, and Angron debated making him move.

“You said we didn’t have a lot of time earlier. Did you change your mind or something?” Angron managed to marshal himself and still his subtle shaking. Hmm. Maybe he should wait…he mentally shook his head. No; best to do this now, before cowardice took him or someone talked him out of it.

Crawyen still wouldn’t move. Angron twitched all over his body, but still managed to control himself. “You’re barely conscious and you nearly starved yourself with the last third,” he stated firmly. “You _will_ wait, and you _will_ sleep while you’re doing it.” There was power and threat behind his father’s words.

Angron made himself think; instinct was demanding—wait. _Khorne_ was demanding he go. _Khorne_ wanted him to reclaim the final third before he was ready; Angron was exhausted. That was why the shakes had started up again, and that was why his father seemed scarier than usual. He took a deep breath, and shoved Khorne down. “All right,” he agreed. The walk down to his room took forever, and Angron kept wanting to jump at the shadows.

He ran a hand over his head; there was a fine dusting of growing hair, for now too short to determine its color; remembered aches needled at him, since the Nails would stab at him whenever he’d done that before. They were _gone_ , now, and Angron needed to remember that. His father and the Emperor had taken them out; he was free. He realized his tiredness when he finally made it to his room, and the bed, but he lay awake for a long while. Sleep didn’t want to come, no matter how Angron tried to quiet himself.

So, instead, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes, slipping into a trance instead. First he made careful note of his body’s aches and pains. Hunger was already stirring again; he should find a way to get real, fresh meat when he woke. He was certain the Emperor could sort that out for him, considering how he was apparently everywhere at once. Soreness sang through his muscles; he’d used them too much today, between the hours-long fight with the Custodes and the strain of forcing Khorne’s spirit to obey his wishes. Besides, they had grown significantly even though he had only allowed a thin trickle of power through to them.

There were sounds in his room; distant echoes of footsteps from the normal humans who called the Palace home— _he should get up, tear through the Palace, see how many he could kill_ —no. The normal humans weren’t worth his time; they didn’t have a hope of stopping him if he unleashed even a fraction of his old strength, to say nothing of his new strength. There were other, louder echoes of the Custodes patrolling the halls, scanning for threats. They were worth fighting; the match earlier that day had been great fun. Perhaps in the morning, he could have another match, with a different set of five.

His father was breathing steadily, quietly; Angron listened more closely, and discovered he could hear his father’s heartbeat. Just one, where Angron had two, and the Emperor had three. But Crawyen was smaller than either of his sons, only the size of a normal human, and only needed one heart to sustain his life and give him access to his magic. The magic Angron had, but couldn’t use…

He sighed, in his restful trance. He knew where the magic was now; it had always been there, but he had simply never realized that until the Nails were gone. Angron reached for it carefully, and knew his father was eyeing him from the attempted, aborted surge of power. Once again, though his magics stirred, nothing actually came. There was a barrier, of some sort, between Angron and the magic; perhaps if he touched the barrier directly—

_Angron was young once again, barely a few months old. There was sand under his body, and he smelled heat and the trapped scent of thousands of gladiators. Nucreia, then; this was after his rebirth. He was supposed to be sleeping, but could not, so he was taking stock of himself just as he was in the present. Several cracked spots in his rib shield, and one broken chunk pressed against his primary heart. A fully broken leg, and Angron suspected that even if he wasn’t Sleepless, that pain would have kept him up._

_He’d healed himself from the edge of death before, in the mountains, after fighting the strange, lithe creatures that insisted he had to die, but he had gotten exhausted before he’d finished. Perhaps he could try again…he gently reached for the strength he used, pulled just as much as he’d needed loose…there was a building whine in his skull. He shook his head, trying to ignore it, but it was getting louder. Blood started to drip from his nose as he turned his magic towards the break in his leg. A scream, almost, the noise sounded like a human scream—_

_Angron lost control. The power he’d called ripped through his body, fusing both breaks and joints improperly. Then it bled out of his body through his pores, pulverizing non-vital organs in the process. He clutched his head; the scream continued. The trickle of blood from his nose became a stream; the need to kill, to break, roared through him, and lacking any appropriate targets, he punched the wall again and again and again. Something snapped in his hand and his mind, then in his ribs and leg and the joints he’d briefly fused—he was the one screaming._

_Pain whirled through him once again, and he collapsed onto his injured leg. Broken ribs protested his strained breathing, but at least the nosebleed had slowed down. The power that Angron had so briefly harnessed was still there; the Nails were still singing a hateful tune, so Angron shoved his power down, away from himself. The further he shoved, the less his Nails sang, but they wouldn’t stop altogether until he built a wall between himself and his magic, a wall through which his power could barely respond. He didn’t want that wall to break, not ever, and he didn’t want to risk his rages suddenly bursting through it, so he ordered it to get stronger, harder, the angrier he became…_

Angron’s eyelids fluttered, but he refused to open his eyes. _Oh,_ was all he could think.

He’d lost track of what he’d already catalogued, so he began again from the top. Aching muscles, building hunger, the normal humans of the palace, the patrolling Custodes…a quiet noise, fabric brushing against fabric as someone climbed a wall to sit in the ceiling. Alpharius, it could only be Alpharius; as if his strange brother knew he’d been heard, odd chiming noises entered his mind. Metal rang against metal, pushed together by breezes or someone’s hand, a strangely soothing sound that kept Angron’s attention long after he should have moved on to other sounds…

~~*~~

There was a rhythm to the battle between Angron and the Emperor, and it wasn’t hard to spot if one could keep up with the sheer speed of the battle. Neither Angron nor the Emperor wore power armor—both had opted to wear the minimum amount of clothing—and each bore only one weapon: for Angron, a chainaxe he’d yet to decide on a name for, and for the Emperor, his flame-wreathed Talon. Heat scorched Angron’s skin whenever the Emperor got close to hitting him, but the Talon was always turned aside before it could actually scorch or scar his skin. Angron primarily used the chainaxe as a standard weapon, only pulling the trigger for the chain when he got close to striking the Emperor, and never actually cutting the skin.

Hurting each other wasn’t the point. The point was to see how long the other could last, and to see how long Angron could go before Khorne’s soul would start to feed into his own. The last three times they had fought, Angron had failed to control the blood god’s spirit. The first time, he had accidentally drawn the Emperor’s blood, and had needed to be contained by six Custodes before he managed to come back to himself. The second, he had twisted at precisely the wrong moment, and gotten a deep gash along his torso as a result; he had dropped the axe immediately after the blow, but had still needed to be wrestled down by two Custodes. The last time, just two days ago, his axe had slipped while he was revving it, and he’d very nearly amputated the Emperor’s arm; instead of continuing the fight, Angron had torn himself away from it, still clutching his axe, and made himself take deep breaths until he was certain he had himself under control.

So far, he had outlasted all his previous times. So far, Khorne’s strength was not overwhelming him. So far, the rage had not yet taken him. Angron could do this. He _would_ do this; he would prove to his brother that he could control Khorne’s essence, and that his plan would work—

Yet the Emperor kept pressing him, kept swinging his Talon and threatening to eviscerate him, but never actually coming close. Angron was missing something, something the Emperor wanted him to do, clearly. What was it? He licked his lips as he thought, parrying, sidestepping, dodging, blocking…

What if the point wasn’t for Angron to prove he could hold Khorne’s essence back? He fell back a step as the Emperor swung at his head; the fire flickered within an inch of his eyes, and he could feel them watering at the sudden heat. Still, the question bothered him. _What if I’m supposed to use his power somehow, without getting lost?_ He could feel Khorne’s divided soul within him, raging as it always did, furious at being trapped, yet unable to get free…

His eyes went unfocused as he mechanically blocked and dodged away from the Emperor. Silently, within his mind, he went down to Khorne. Not so far away was his power, the strength he had locked away to save himself from the Nails’ singing. He paused just between them, considering, then ignored Khorne’s furious banging on the iron door that held him back just as surely as it had once held Angron back on Nucreia in favor of his own power.

The barrier was there, and it was as strong as always. Angron stood before it, and made himself calm. Not a trance—the barrier had never broken in a trance—and not sleep either. But calm. Simple, studied calm that would break only when he willed it. The barrier weakened a little, but held. He took a breath, and thought carefully about what he might need to do.

The Emperor cut his cheek; the fire on his Talons instantly cauterized the wound, but it still stung and the door bent under Khorne’s fury behind him. Angron made himself remain composed. Perhaps the barrier wasn’t breaking because he wasn’t whole. Perhaps he needed to stand before it, both as his daemon self and the self he wanted to be. Slow, deliberate, heavy hoofsteps came up behind him; mortal instinct demanded he run from whatever this terrible thing was, shrieked that there was no way he could fight it, and that he ought to flee and preserve his life as long as he could—

Instead, Angron turned to face it. The Daemon Prince Angron had been and still was stood stooped, as though it took effort to stand upright. Effort, or perhaps it was unbalanced. It breathed heavily, released a chuckle at the female that dared stand in its way; it could annihilate the female if it wished, but the defiance amused it. Angron’s lips twitched then, and realized the Daemon Prince saw itself as separate, better than the human self, the self that was female by necessity; then he realized that his human self thought the same of his daemon self.

The daemon licked its lips; Angron closed his eyes both within and without his mind. Then he called to the horns his daemon self wore so proudly, the horns that gave it all the strength it needed to survive no matter what it did. The daemon’s face twisted in anger, then surprise when it saw its own horns mirrored on Angron’s forehead. Before it could rage, Angron offered a hand to the creature, a hand and an understanding.

The daemon hesitated, snarling confusion; Angron could feel it debating whether to simply kill him now, could feel it start to reach the conclusion that it was better off alone. So he gestured mutely behind himself to the vats of power that were theirs—both his and the daemon’s, but which the daemon had never been able to touch—and at the crack in the barrier he had made. The daemon muscled him aside, worked bone-talons into the cracks to try and widen it, then snarled questioningly at him.

 _I calmed myself,_ Angron answered its mute question. The daemon either couldn’t or didn’t want to speak, and attempted to puncture the barrier with one bone-talon. It quivered a little, but did not break. _I think you know how to open it the rest of the way,_ Angron told it.

It scoffed at him. _I know your type, human. You want my help so you can enslave me just like everyone else. The high riders on Nucreia, the golden-armored hero, the ones we called friends, the ones who claimed they did our bidding…you’re all the same. I don’t need you or anyone else for that matter._ It lifted both hands to strike the barrier again, and this time Khorne was laughing behind them. Angron backed away then, and let the daemon strike once, twice, three times.

Frustration and fury mounted within the daemon, and the barrier started to heal itself. Somewhere above them both, Angron whirled his chainaxe at the Emperor, revving it when he got within a half inch of his brother’s skin; still in control, but very close to the edge. _There are two wells of power, you know,_ he pointed out to the daemon, which wheeled on him, triple rows of teeth bared. _And there are two of us. How about you get one, and I get the other?_ he offered. He supposed the Emperor would have continued with some bull about equality, but it was pointless to offer the lie to the Daemon Prince. It just as pointless to offer the lie to Angron; there was no such thing as equality in this galaxy, and never had been.

The daemon considered, then shook its head. _You’ll take the most valuable one,_ it sneered.

_Even if I let you have first pick?_

This gave the daemon pause. Khorne seethed behind them, and bent his door again. The daemon rolled its eyes, and stomped; the door smoothed itself out once more, and Khorne bellowed his fury yet again. _…you will make me take the less valuable one, still,_ the daemon said, but it was uncertain.

 _I know one of the wells contains healing,_ Angron told it. _The other is…strange to me. The memories are there, and it is powerful, but I don’t know how to use it or what it can do._ He paused. _It might have something to do with souls._ He was fairly certain it did, but didn’t want to state it as truth in case he was wrong.

 _So my options are healing and a mystery, possibly more control over souls?_ The daemon scoffed. _I have more than enough control over souls. You kill its body, then you consume what’s released. Healing it is._ Once again it squared itself off with the barrier, and this time Angron came to stand beside it.

 _I guess I’ll take the mystery…and I’m completely certain that you got the best option of the two, considering how much we like to fight,_ Angron sounded sour, and base pleasure rippled through the Daemon Prince. It finally moved its bone plates aside enough that Angron could touch its flesh and share his calmness with his other self.

Once again the barrier cracked, and worse this time. The Daemon Prince grinned, and struck at the same spot it had been hitting—the weakest point of the crack, and the spot that was most likely to break if hit enough. This time, the barrier shattered. The daemon didn’t hesitate a moment before striding forward and guzzling the vat of power that was its promised share. Angron drank a little more cautiously of his vat, and the Daemon Prince snarled as though betrayed.

The power over souls—it had to be that, Angron was absolutely certain now—was his to command, and therefore so was the Daemon Prince’s very existence. But they shared a body; with Angron in control, the daemon had to heal his injuries if it wished to live, and with the daemon in control, Angron had to feed its existence if _he_ wished to live. _Stop calling me daemon!_ it snarled, towering over Angron and threatening to squash him flat. _I am Angron!_

Angron paused. _That is also my name,_ he said quietly. _I assumed you had chosen a different one._ His lips twisted in a frown, and the Daemon Prince named Angron reared back.

_You remember everything I do._

_Nucreia, the Nails, Lorgar, Ascension…_

_We were happy._

_We had purpose._

_We were given purpose._

_Khorne is the same as all the other masters;_

_He just made us think we were happy,_

_Because between the Nails and the power he gave us—_

_We didn’t have a choice but to be happy._

Angron looked at himself twice over. Daemon Prince met the eyes of a human, a female form that had not tasted Khorne’s corruption, and human female met the eyes of a Daemon Prince, who had drunk deeply of Khorne’s power, and yet maintained its self. They had accidentally separated when Angron had woken first, so his human self informed his daemon self of what it had been doing, and what it meant to do now. The daemon grinned wickedly in its turn, and said that this purpose was a fine one.

Human touched daemon, and became one. Angron had to kick the Emperor away as his body rippled protest at the fusion. His horns were now exposed, and always would be; they fed him information on all the souls in the room, and he was buffeted by a confusing array of sensations from the Emperor.

_A thousand souls every day, for twelve thousand years…he has billions of souls protecting his core self._

It was a staggering amount of information, and Angron couldn’t process it. He tapped the hilt of his axe three times against the ground to yield and give himself time to push his understanding through to the surface. He felt his face contort with the effort, but finally he managed by pushing the soul-awareness to a subconscious level. A place he could reach, even while awake, if he reached deliberately, but not a place he would be constantly bothered and distracted.

The Emperor was near enough to touch, and was offering a hand. He could have made Angron stand up, but was choosing not to. Angron valued his respect, and took the hand; it took him a while to open his eyes, and he was half blinded by the sudden glare emanating from everyone in the room. The Emperor just before him, shining gold and starlike behind a shifting rainbow; the Custodes with him, their own varied cores wrapped and shot through with the Emperor’s bright gold—did he know he’d twisted their souls as much as their bodies? Angron decided he’d say something if asked, but not before.

Alpharius, shining blue pale not far away; another soul mirrored his high above. Angron glanced at it, then away. Guilliman’s steady, darker blue haloed with grey-black from some foreign entity that sank tendrils deep into his core. His father’s gentle red. They were all proud of him…why? He’d lost when he could have won.

“That’s the point though,” the Emperor said. “You won by losing.” 

It was just like the Emperor to make no sense whatsoever. Not that it mattered to Angron for more than a few seconds; when the Emperor offered a hand, and Angron took it, the last third of Khorne was there. Angron could take it, if he wanted, but the Emperor would not force it on him. He closed his eyes, braced himself, and was back in his mind.

The last shred of Khorne’s power launched itself forward, attempting to join with the rest; instead of rushing it along, as he had before, he held it back. It took more effort than he wanted to admit, and more effort still to hold the mutations it threatened to ‘bless’ him with in check. Yet Angron held on, even as it turned on him and Khorne once again bent the door of his prison.

The thing dug its claws into his head, exactly where Angron’s Nails had been, and woke his memories of the feelings they had engendered. He howled in pain, but still held on. The essence dragged him then, through fields of memories that Angron had never forgotten and never would. Still he hung on, feeling the creature weaken.

Then Angron’s strength halved; his daemon self separated to go to Khorne’s prison without another word. Now it was the final third that was holding Angron, and Angron who was struggling to free himself from its claws, its embrace, the great bloody sea… Nascent power crackled at Angron’s command, and he turned its fury on the third of Khorne’s essence that held him. It shrieked its pain, its grip loosened, and Angron kept the power turned on it—

The sound of Khorne’s prison door ripping free broke his concentration. The lightning-like energy he’d been turning on the final third flickered for an instant, but it was enough; Khorne was loose inside of Angron. His daemon’s strength returned to him, but it was precious little comfort. By the time he kicked his way to the surface of the ocean, he stood before a fully re-empowered Khorne on a smooth red plain that looked so very much like a battlefield covered with blood. A battlefield Angron had ravaged himself so frequently that he knew every rock and crevice by heart.

Win by losing…why was that phrase echoing through his head…? It was nonsensical; Angron had never, until a few moments ago—it had just been a few moments, Angron was sure of that much—won a battle by not destroying his enemy, or at least beating them until they could no longer stand before him. _Neither has Khorne,_ his daemon self whispered. Angron’s eyes narrowed, and he regarded Khorne carefully.

“No weapons,” he growled. “We fight honorably, as humans.”

Khorne snarled fury, but couldn’t disagree; honor was the one thing he valued above all else, save the spilling of blood and taking of skulls. It was why he hated psykers so. The Chaos God’s form compressed into something only slightly shorter than Angron, and became that of a human’s: it had a tangled mass of black hair, a malformed leg, and claws on its hands that dripped blood. When it looked up, Angron saw that its eyes were Khorne’s dark crimson, and when it smiled, its teeth were equally sharp and bled where they sank into its gums.

If this was supposed to scare or disturb Angron, it wasn’t working. He shrugged, flexed his muscles, and planted his feet for Khorne’s charge. When it came, Angron caught him in a suplex; the yowl, at least, was weirdly familiar. Not that Angron had the time or inclination to worry about it, as Khorne didn’t waste even a single moment not attacking him. Angron dodged the swipes from the claws after he caught one on an arm and found that it wouldn’t stop bleeding even with his daemon’s blood magic fully applied to it.

Hours or seconds passed; the fight tore through the entire, neatly circular arena Khorne had made, and neither he nor Angron could gain the upper hand. The longer the fight dragged on, the more Angron was reminded of the unthinking fury that had so frequently consumed him as a Daemon Prince, and of the mindless rage that had sometimes taken his Astartes after they had gotten the reverse-engineered Nails. How there was nothing to be done with them, save restrain them between battles, how they did not and could not differentiate friend from foe, how the only thing that mattered was the kill, and the one after that, and the one after that…

 _Win by losing._ Angron made his decision, and waited for his chance. Khorne feinted high; his daemon self stepped out; Angron chose to block the feint, completely aware of the real strike that punched through his ribs and gripped his primary heart. He gave himself over to his soul-magic just as the heart was ripped out: not a death blow, unless he wanted it to be. Brilliant red-white power exploded out of him, and Khorne vanished without a sound.

The heart was still there, still beating in the arena; Angron’s daemon self picked it up, and put it back in his human self’s breast where it belonged, then followed it. Angron breathed, then breathed again; the wound began to heal. He opened his eyes, groaning at the pain, and watched the mock sky above him. It fluttered with red-black eddies of uncontrolled power that no longer had a home. It would take centuries, millennia even, for it to pull back into a proper form; Angron remembered that pain from his own death on Armageddon.

He reached up with an insubstantial hand and pulled at the strongest eddy; the power immediately swirled into him, having found a home. Once more Angron felt his muscles puff with strength, but it was no mutational energy he barely had control over. He instinctively understood exactly what the energy was doing, why it was doing it, and how to control exactly what it did. Instinct told him how to reclaim the energies of those few remaining Khornate daemons and put them out of their misery; instinct told him how to create new daemons that followed Angron alone, and knew nothing of Khorne.

He reached out with new senses, and felt the aching place in the Warp where Khorne’s battlegrounds had been, and where Angron one day would build his own palace. Once he was bored of the Materium, and done helping his brother. There were all those Khorne’s power had touched, hidden away in secret places, desperately spilling blood—usually their own—to regain his favor. Angron stopped their foolishness with a thought; their god was named Angron now, and Angron wanted _warriors_ , not weakling butchers. If they wanted his favor, they had better learn to fight properly, he told them, and was obeyed.

It took more effort to hear the voices of the followers of Chaos Undivided; most of them had fallen onto the power of the other Chaos Gods to make up for the lack of Khorne’s strength. Angron shared a small fraction of his strength with them, even Abaddon; he was amused when the Warmaster failed to recognize him until he named himself.

Then Angron opened his eyes and found his father was holding him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Angron replaces Khorne as the war god of chaos. There's one more in this little miniseries (in which Angron goes about a day as the new war god), but yanno. The original version of this also used to have Sargeras in place of Uskary--and it made more sense to just swap the name out, seeing as how Uskary is the granddad and eventually turned out to be possessing Sargeras (in the long-running rp between myself and HoHoLupercal). Also this was written before the Angron Primarch book was released, and thus before it was made clear by Games Workshop that Angron only got the Nails as an adult rather than a child, as the various wikis and available literature had been indicating up to that point. Still think that this is the best possible ending for Angron as a character though.
> 
> Peep ownership:  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> The_LupercalXVI: Uskary, Crawyen, Lokan (weird tattooed guy--very powerful, long story), and Zaeldra (red-bronze lady who got no lines in this but who is very important)  
> me: the writing and the Emperor's name


	4. And Those Who Follow

It hadn’t taken Angron very long to be drawn to the space in the Warp that was his—the space that had once been Khorne’s, but he had consumed the old god of blood. He was not one for pensive moods, and so he had not thought much about what to place there; fortunately, the place responded to his needs. The first time he had wandered to his space in the Warp, a simple tent had manifested itself on the red-stained sand: the cloth was sturdy, similar to the sort the Astartes of other Legions had used to protect themselves from inclement weather (Angron’s World Eaters had never bothered with such things, as they had never been on any planet long enough to require them); it was plainly decorated and had seen some weathering already (perhaps a superstition, but it hailed back to the time when Angron had been a mere gladiator on Nucreia; unused things always seemed to fail faster than used ones); and had a lighter area on one side where he could place a sigil, if he wanted (once he figured out a suitable one).

At the time, he had only wanted a place to sleep; the tent contained only a moderately comfortable bedroll and some of his favorite weapons: his chainaxes, naturally, but also the throwing knives and guardian spear he had appropriated from the Imperial Palace. He grinned to see them, and slept comfortably. When he woke, he took them all with him; the battle that called to him was between Necron and Eldar, entertainingly, and he was forced to take on his daemonic male form. The Necrons could not be affected by the Warp sorcery he occasionally toyed with, and the Eldar were too gifted at countering such things as a novice—even one with godly power—could come up with.

 _Still strange that I was called to a battle that doesn’t involve humans…_ he mused while stomping his way through a weaker portion of the Necron lines, only to swiftly turn on the Eldar when they overextended themselves to take advantage of the hole he’d made. Something flickered at the edge of his consciousness, and he shoved his way through both sides of the battle rather than hesitate to figure out what it was. He would find out when he got there, after all.

He bellowed laughter when he arrived. His own World Eaters had somehow managed to activate the Necrons, and had taken advantage of the resulting distraction to take young males for new marines. “So we’re slaving now?” Angron asked of them, almost casual, but he saw each of his Astartes square off for a battle with him. He grinned and felt their answering grins in his being, though for many of them, smiles were impossible until after they had killed.

“They wanted rescue from the Eldar,” one of the World Eaters explained, half gesturing towards the cowering humans behind them. “They have it. Call it a price for service,” he continued, glowering at one mortal who had broken free of the lines to clutch at one of the claimed children who must have been her son.

Angron grunted, and stepped between the World Eaters and the mortals they were ‘saving’ after a fashion; as he moved, he shrank himself down into his more normal-looking female form. The woman looked no less terrified to be in his presence, but clutched her son closer and glared as much as she could. Angron knelt to be on her level and cocked his head to the left. “You know full well he’d be a space marine. Isn’t that the greatest honor a son of the Imperium can have?”

“Space marine of your Traitor World Eaters!” she spat. “There’s no honor in butchery!”

Angron grinned. “Glad we’re in agreement. Well, there’s only one way to settle this, then. You want to keep him so badly?” he stood up smoothly; the woman copied him, her hands balled into fists, but she flinched when Angron tossed one of his throwing daggers—large enough to be a short sword in her hands—between her feet. “Fight for him.”

For an instant, she hesitated. For an instant, Angron wondered if she’d take the bait. Then she ignored the weapon he’d offered and charged him bare-handed. First she threw a punch at his jaw, and she cried out in pain when her hand shattered; her luck was only slightly better when she punched him in the sensitive point under the ribs, where muscle supported his lungs. Angron laughed, pushed her over—taking care to not injure her further—and said, “You. I like you. You can keep your son, if you’re willing to challenge a god of war for him.”

Her eyes widened, but Angron had already moved on. A child—a young child with a clubfoot—broke the lines, clutching a dagger. “I can fight!” he was protesting at the World Eaters meaning to throw him back; they stopped at Angron’s gesture, though even he scoffed at the child.

“You? You are weak and sickly; how could you be worthy of becoming an Astartes, let alone a World Eater?” In answer, the boy howled and struck at Angron with his knife. The hit was wild, and the boy lost his grip on his knife, which stayed embedded in Angron’s hip. Angron grinned fiercely at the child, then yanked the knife out of his flesh. “Adorable. Take him. The foot can be corrected one way or another.” He gave the knife back as his World Eaters claimed the child.

So it went on; the battle behind the World Eaters made Angron’s form glow bright red with strength and borrowed power. Other parents defended their children; other children threw themselves at the World Eaters—for many, Angron could see, there was no better place to go. The situation only grew tricky for him when a child launched himself free of the lines, only to be pursued by a parent—a father, by the looks of things, a man who had been a warrior but had gone to seed by thorough application of alcohol. Angron scowled; he despised the stuff, for all the Emperor loved it.

“He is mine—” the father was saying.

“Don’t send me back to him—” the boy managed between gasps for breath. Odd; he’d only run a few dozen feet.

“I’ll fight for him!” the father declared.

“I’ll do anything!” The boy would have continued, but he started coughing, and Angron’s eyes snapped to a large, dark bruise on his chest. 

The argument would have continued, but Angron revved his chainaxe. “SILENCE!” he roared, and the world obeyed him for a moment. Even the battle behind him was muted. First, in silence, he knelt to inspect the boy. Malnutrition had kept him small, and the bruise was indeed from broken ribs. There were other bruises all over his body, many of them finger- or hand-shaped. Angron frowned, and turned his attention to the man and his hands—an exact match for the marks he’d seen on the boy. He growled, and moved the boy behind him; the line of World Eaters moved closer, but didn’t quite claim him.

Angron walked over to the man, slowly, taking his time to allow the threat to build in the man’s mind. “You have abused your child, and you want me to give him back to you.” In the mouth of another—in the mouth of the Emperor—the sentence would have been an incredulous question. For Angron, it was merely a statement of fact. The man’s jaw was set firmly; Angron saw teeth grind as he nodded. “Well. I’ve been letting everyone else fight me to have their children back. Don’t see why I shouldn’t extend you the opportunity,” he said, feeling fear billow up from the child behind him and vicious hope from the man—the butcher—before him.

The hope grew when Angron handed the man a chainaxe; he clearly knew how to use it, and Angron allowed himself a half-smirk. “Draw blood from me, and you can have him back.” The man scoffed; easy enough even for a warrior gone to seed like him, since Angron had been letting everyone else land one blow before striking them away. Angron allowed the man to firmly grip the chainaxe. He allowed the man to lift it for a swing that would have removed the leg of any mortal. He even allowed the man to gun its motor. But in the half-second between the man’s beginning his swing and its completion, Angron snapped into his male, daemon form and punched his way through the man’s head. “You lose,” he growled. The corpse fell off his outstretched arm; he recovered his chainaxe and favored the gathered mortals with one more glance.

No one else would run forward after that display, and no parent would be willing to protect their child either. “Take them back to my battlegrounds,” he ordered, and was obeyed; the abused child was quick at gathering the weapons Angron had offered to some of the parents, and carried them to Angron. It was easier to pick up the child along with the weapons, and to personally carry both into his place in the Warp.

The tent, he discovered, had transformed itself into a mud-brick house in a style Angron only dimly remembered; there was sufficient room for all his new Aspirant World Eaters, along with the scattered few Apothecaries with them, and a room in which the implantations could be safely and cleanly done. Angron was certain that food and room in which to eat would similarly present itself, just as the entire house had done, and nodded his approval. The rest of the World Eaters—as was their custom these days—would simply move on to other fields, other battles, other wars. Angron stayed only long enough to catch one of the Apothecaries by an arm. “No Nails. Those are punishment.”

“I’ll pass the word, Primarch,” the Apothecary swore. There was no need for a salute or respectful wording; the only thing Angron wanted of his followers was war—honorable war, as opposed to the simple butchery that Khorne had unleashed upon the war. Salutes, respect, parades—things such as Guilliman enjoyed—were showy, disgraceful things; pompous acts designed to fool a commander that inaction was action.

Angron had no time for such idiocy.

~~*~~

The back of the house that Angron now happily called his was best served as a flat arena for his Neophytes—and his captured worshippers—to train. It also served Angron well as a place to acquire new skills, such as the fine art of fighting with shields, chains tipped with large sword blades—the Emperor truly did have an impressive collection of games with some fascinating weapons—and practicing other methods of killing with weapons he already knew. The last served as an excellent method of meditation, which in turn served as an excellent way of hearing about the various battles scattered about the galaxy and the prayers of those involved in them, or those about to enter them.

Now, rather than waiting for a battle to explode into something that could easily be called a war, he could send his World Eaters to a minor skirmish, where they could escalate things into a battle, and then into a full-scale war. Wars and the deaths within them fed him strength; the stronger he was, the more wars he could spark, and the stronger he could become. It also meant that he could begin to hear the prayers and thoughts of those involved in supporting the fighting of a war: those who created the weapons with which the warriors fought, those who carried the weapons to the field, and those who healed the wounded warriors upon their return.

Some of the prayers he heard were technically addressed to the Emperor; in rare cases, he and the Emperor heard the prayer at the same time. They didn’t have long conversations at such times; generally, they only spoke long enough to determine whose power was best applied to the mortal making the prayer. Angron was never shy about admitting the Emperor was the stronger of the two, when the mortal asked for the strongest to bless him—after all, the Emperor drew strength from the mere existence of humans within the galaxy, and from anything and everything they did. Angron could draw strength from any war started by any race against another, but the power he received was highest when there were humans involved—especially humans who were already aligned with Chaos.

Thus, when he practiced some of the more complex pattern dances the Custodes employed to keep their skills sharp, he wasn’t surprised to hear the prayer of a mortal about to go into battle for the first time. _…may the Emperor keep me safe in the battle to come, may he understand what I am being made to do…_ Angron heard before he smiled to himself and decided to answer.

 _New to this whole war thing, are you?_ he whispered in their mind. The mortal—a psyker, he noted with moderate interest—startled to hear him. Angron waited a moment to see if the Emperor would answer himself; it did seem to be the sort of situation that would result in both of them being in the mortal’s head at the same time. Yet the Emperor didn’t respond, so Angron mentally shrugged. _Well, you’re right that the Emperor usually does the whole protection thing, but I can pull it off myself. You just have to fight a little harder for it,_ he informed the psyker, not unkindly.

 _You…you’re one of the Chaos gods…_ the mortal finally managed to squeak. They were afraid—extremely afraid, but mostly of the usual threats the Imperium instilled in its citizens. Corruption, heresy, daemonic possession…and in the case of the psyker, being squashed like a bug for being noticed by the god of…blood?

Oh, that wouldn’t do. _You think I’m Khorne, don’t you?_ Angron thought; he allowed his displeasure to shine through, and the psyker quailed—but not enough to sever the connection between them. Angron took enough time to determine that the psyker had grown up on a world distant from the Imperium’s heart, one which was rarely visited by the Black Ships of the Inquisition and which therefore made semi-sanctioned use of its native psykers in proxy battles between the various lords on the planet’s surface. The planetary governor was a distant force in the sky, who never left his pleasure barge. _I suppose it’s reasonable enough that this planet hasn’t gotten the memo, psyker…Arellin, is it?_ The psyker nodded agreement. _I am Angron. I was Primarch of the World Eaters, and many other things besides—including Traitor to the Emperor and Daemon Prince of Khorne. Thing is, Khorne’s dead. I consumed his essence._ He paused for a moment to allow his words to sink in. _There’s no blood god any longer. I’m the god of war, and the god of war says psykers can follow him and receive his gifts, so long as they fight and do so honorably. Same rule as everyone else._

The psyker—Arellin—took a shuddering breath. They weren’t quite sure what to think, but clearly wished to tread carefully around this apparent Chaos god of war. _Are you…still a Traitor to the…?_

Angron shrugged in reply. _More like his interests and mine are aligned to a large degree. Otherwise, he does his thing and I do mine._

Arellin hesitated. _I just…I just want to live through this fight. I don’t really care if it’s you or the Emperor who protects me. Would you—_

 _Depends. You gonna fight in the battle? Cause I won’t let you out of that much._ The Emperor would have spirited the psyker away to some other world at the other end of the galaxy probably, but Angron couldn’t quite reach so far in a single step. Not without going there, and then he could only just reach the Warp, his home, and his seat of power. Still strange that the Emperor hadn’t responded at all; Angron promised himself to look into the matter later, after he was done practicing.

Arellin laughed darkly. _I don’t have a choice in fighting. If I won’t fight, they kill me. Or they turn me over to the Inquisition. Or something worse. They might do all that anyway if I lose, or they might turn on my family…_

Angron nodded both to himself and to Arellin. _Very well. You have my protection. Specifically, you’ll live through the battle, win or lose. If you try to win, though, the more you’ll see how to actually go about winning._

 _So…you’ll make sure I win?_ Arellin asked; he winced, felt a spot on his belly sear with pain. When he touched the area, he felt raised flesh—tender, as if from a brand—and his eyes widened.

A common misconception. _No. All I’ll do is ensure your survival. Winning is entirely up to you. But if you try and win, the more you’ll see, and therefore the easier winning will be,_ Angron corrected them, as gently as he usually was with his new followers. Arellin nodded, made sure his official tunic was covering his mark of loyalty, and went to battle.

The entire time, Angron felt his thoughts. _I want to win. I will beat the other guy. My lord just wants him humiliated, not dead—_ There was relief in his mental voice; that would likely change the longer he was in Angron’s service, but it didn’t matter for now. _Throne, it’s miserable out here._

The first way to make his victory easier: make the air around himself cooler. A simple psychic twist that didn’t take much power, but would matter in a drawn-out fight. Of course, he’d need to win quickly. Arellin rubbed his hands rather than his sore loyalty-mark. The psyker he faced was mentally broken, there only to ensure his lord’s victory, since it meant a brief end to his suffering. He didn’t care if he won, Arellin saw.

The fight commenced; Arellin tried. They were stronger than he was, but they were also slow, ponderous. It took time to build their strength, and time to bring it to bear on him—or more accurately, his location. If Arellin stood still just long enough for the attack to begin, and moved right before it struck, he would be safe. If he switched out the method of his attacks often, the other psyker couldn’t defend herself properly. In the end, the opposing psyker’s strength gave out, and they collapsed. Arellin made his way back to his lord, his castle, and his pleasure. All he needed to do after that was ensure his loyalty mark stayed covered, and that was easy enough given its location.

Angron smiled then, and set off to learn what was occupying the Emperor’s attention so greatly that he couldn’t spare the attention for an upset psyker—something he usually went out of his way to discover and alleviate. Whatever it was might even stand to be interesting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not a great title, I know, but after studying so long I couldn't come up with anything better. Enjoy anyway.
> 
> Peep ownership:  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> Me: the writing


End file.
